On Sat, Apr 5, 2008 at 3:01 AM, Paul Johnson <baloo at ursine.ca> wrote:
> It would be better if it encouraged conversational quoting, since a
> well-quoted message will still make sense out of proper thread context, even
> if previous messages never made it. There's no need to go have it spit out
> ancient history from upthread...
>> Speaking of which, I know correct quoting is readily possible in gmail;
> strongly consider doing that instead of top-posting.
Well, it was just a suggestion o_o... and do you know if gmail does so
automatically? it's kinda annoying to move to the end of everything
when you reply.
> It's often easier to search one's own archives than, say, a forum.
Then you reinstall or the mail server decides to take a break and all
your archives are gone down the drain. So much for keeping archives -
same on forums though =/ but I have to agree that it's easier, or at
least, less clicks away ;).
> I can recall a time when wine-users rightfully sent people to the
> documentation, preferring to save list traffic for firefighting trickier
> problems not readily gleaned from the documentation.
RTFM isn't an always-works option though, and it's sometimes
frustrating to ask for help somewhere after you've googled and looked
for documentation around, to find some human-bots giving you the same
links you've read, being rude to you and absolutely not helping at
all, other than saying RTFM in different ways, or start to make fun of
you. It doesn't help at all.
Personally, I've felt better with the current mailing list traffic...
there's more help oriented to what people use WINE for, to what it's
in great demand (Steam, IE6-7, Office 2003/2007, Warcraft 3, WoW, old
16-bit games...) and more people helping each other and trying
solutions :).
> I would take a closer look at causation instead of dwelling on the consequence
> to prevent such things from happening in the future. Chasing away
> experienced users does a great disservice to new users in the long term.
It does, but it's their decision. The cause has always been the merge
of mailing list and forum. His problem is apparently the lack of
technicism in the latest emails, the lack of quoting and assumes
everyone uses the forum. There's people who are in the mailing list
and sometimes quote and sometimes don't. There's no way you can force
people to do so, specially forum-spawn, unless you ban them for that,
but then, you'll need to have a ton of moderators taking a look at
each forum post, then everybody getting banned and utter chaos of
threads like "WHY DID U BAN ME FXXX MODZZZZ!!!!11!!1oneoneelevenone".
Thing would be how to improve the situation instead.
HOWEVER he just leaves instead of suggesting a solution and saving the
trouble. A lot of people complain, but few suggest constructive
critics.
> There's a readily apparent difference between social environments and
> technically oriented lists.
IMHO, for the "technical" stuff there's wine-devel, or so I've learnt
from the last emails when the forum fuss started.